In Long-Awaited Report, MLA Outlines Problems and Solutions for Humanities Scholars

By JENNIFER HOWARD

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The Modern Language Association today released the long-awaited report of its Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. The report, which describes a series of problems affecting the humanities profession and recommends broad solutions to the problems, is available on the MLA's Web site.

Written by a seven-member task force that was led by Domna C. Stanton, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the association's 2005 president, the report offers a thorough historical analysis of "the shifting nature of academic work over the past decades." It lays out the well-known financial pressures on university presses and the ever-increasing demands for teaching and publication faced by junior faculty members as they navigate "changes in the resources for disseminating scholarship," including digital media.

It also declares that while those factors, along with changes in educational policies, have brought the profession to "a threshold moment," the situation has not yet reached a crisis.

"We can state that faculty members hired to tenure-track appointments over the last 10 years have been tenured in ways -- and at rates -- similar to their predecessors," the report says. "There has, to date, been no 'lost generation of scholars' from the tenure track."

The report offers 20 broad recommendations on how to deal with the problems that it did identify in the hiring and tenuring process. It calls on the field to be wary of "the tyranny of the monograph" and "to recognize ... that valuable and important scholarship can take multiple forms." It states that the profession and academe as a whole "need to rethink not only the conception of the dissertation as a larval monograph but also, and more broadly, the entire graduate curriculum." The task force also calls for the practice and promotion of "transparency throughout the tenuring process."

But the report mostly leaves the challenge of making specific reforms up to individual departments and institutions. As the report puts it, "requirements for tenure and promotion should be tailored to the mission of the institution." And it recommends further study of several issues, including faculty salaries, unions, tenure appeals, and how minority faculty members fare in hiring and promoting decisions.

Taking Stock

The MLA's Executive Council established the task force in 2004 "to examine current standards and emerging trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English and foreign-language departments in the United States." It was also charged with finding out whether the "widespread anxiety" in the field about "ever-rising demands for research productivity and shrinking humanities lists by academic publishers" was justified.

Some of the most striking findings in the report involve data from an extensive survey of 1,330 language and literature departments the task force conducted at 734 American institutions. Fifty-one percent of all departments and 67 percent of all institutions responded. The survey, administered in the spring of 2005, solicited detailed information about publication, tenure, and promotion over a 10-year period beginning in 1993-94.

The resulting set of data "substantiates some worries and mitigates others," the report concludes. On the positive side, the task force found that, as late as 2004, there was no evidence to confirm the belief that humanities publishing is in crisis, "although there are reasons to believe that publishing opportunities may be narrowing further."

Junior faculty members' fears about tenure appear to be overblown as well. Based on its survey and data from unspecified "other groups," the task force concluded that only about 35 percent of Ph.D. recipients in MLA-represented fields go on to achieve tenure. But "55 percent to 60 percent of the tenure-track assistant professors hired to a tenure-track position actually go through the tenure process and receive tenure at the institution where they held the original appointment."

On the gloomier side, however, the report confirms that those Ph.D.'s do face increasing pressure to publish, a trend driven by leading research universities but also in evidence at institutions where faculty members carry heavier teaching loads.

"Over 62 percent of all departments report that publication has increased in importance in tenure decisions over the last 10 years," the report says. "The percentage of departments ranking scholarship of primary importance (over teaching) has more than doubled since the last comparable survey, conducted by Thomas Wilcox in 1968: from 35.4 percent to 75.7 percent."

The report also confirms that junior faculty members face this ever-growing pressure at a time "when universities have lowered or eliminated subsidies for scholarly presses, and libraries have dramatically reduced their purchases of books in the humanities."

"And despite a worsening climate for book publication," the report says, "the monograph has become increasingly important in comparison with other forms of publication."

Recommendations for Reform

In response to that confluence of circumstances weighing against younger scholars in the humanities, the task force urged the profession to "develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph" and to "recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media."

Although articles published in refereed journals continue to carry weight in tenure evaluations, the MLA's survey found that many other forms of scholarship do not fare as well. Translations, for instance, were rated "not important" by 30.4 percent of departments, including 31.3 percent of foreign-language departments. Textbooks, bibliographic scholarship, scholarly editions, and editing scholarly journals also took a back seat to monographs and journal articles.

The task force was dismayed by a widespread lack of experience in evaluating digital scholarship. More than 40 percent of departments at Ph.D.-granting institutions said, in response to the survey, that they did not know how to gauge the merit of refereed electronic articles, while 65.7 percent reported that they had no experience judging monographs in that format.

Despite all of those strains, however, the report concludes that junior scholars "have risen to meet these demands" and that anxiety over their tenure prospects has been overstated. "The tenure rate that emerges from the MLA survey ... suggests that over the last decade the increasing demands for scholarly publication have not noticeably harmed the tenure rate of junior scholars."

In addition to considering the results of its own survey, the task force reviewed a number of other reports and studies, consulted with other professional organizations, and interviewed department chairs and administrators to put together a picture of the challenges facing scholars.

The task force said that presses or referees outside each department "should not be the main arbitrators in tenure cases." It also urged that no more than six outside letters of review be considered in the tenure process, and called on institutions and departments to set expectations for tenure requirements when a scholar is hired.

Further study was required, the task force concluded, on the status of faculty members from minority groups, on faculty salaries, and on how many books university presses publish and how best to support their mission.

• Reading and Writing Get Arithmetic (4/14/2006)

• MLA Offers Preview of Report on Tenure and Votes to Oppose 'Academic Bill of Rights' (1/13/2006)